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state had existed for less than a century when the Nazis came along, appealing to the idea of 'Germany' was a non-starter. The parochial regionalism of the country mitigated against a clear conception of statehood in the way the English or French have it. So instead, the concentration was on 'Germanness' - a racial idea of the Volk that harked back to a more ancient history of a people who had lived in the forests and defied effete southern European 'civilisation' in the form of Rome. Needless to say, of course, this ideal was exclusive of other peoples - not least the Jews.
This idea of Germanness was inextricably linked to nature and man's place therein. This can be seen in pre-Nazi German art such as Caspar David Friedrich, the brothers Grimm and Wagner. The symbolism of pre-civilisation paganism is widely used in Nazi regalia (from the oak leaf cluster of the Iron Cross to the runic script used by the SS). This backward-looking worship of nature, the forest and the pre-Christian, pagan past inevitably chimed with environmental and naturist tendencies, which shared with Nazism a desire to shrug off the constraints and 'corruption' of modern Christian civilisation and return to a supposedly better, purer (oh, such a loaded word!) time.
the whole controlling Europe thing.
stuff (the swastika, ffs?). However, the unifying theme was that of the pagan. Christianity never got a look in.